Across The Pond
by solusadvictimam
Summary: A Titanic fic, using characters distinct and separate from the movie's. Please read and review.
1. Preface Manchester Square

Preface – "Manchester Square".  
  
In my dream, I'm running through Hyde Park. The grass beneath me is like pristine velvet, the beds and borders are immaculate, and the brass-tipped railings gleam as I leave, and run down Regent Street, down Oxford Street, past Selfridges, new and pure, white marble, gilt and Corinthian columns aglitter in the Edwardian sun. I run down Manchester Street, and home.  
  
As it happens, I visited Manchester Square, not so long ago. I found it much changed. I walked through Hyde Park, where the rolling expanses of grass – rough now, short and sharp, and utilitarian – was punctuated by sharp rows of trench shelters. The women in Oxford Street wear trousers now, and skirts – they smoke openly, they catch buses, and vanish into the Underground.  
  
Even now, thirty years later, I still want to go there, and ride the tube.  
  
Selfridges is in a sorry state. It looks grimy, its windows are sandbagged, taped, its upper floors redundant.  
  
In Manchester Square, the central garden has been given over to vegetable plots. It's been twenty years since Aunt Edith lived here, and a decade since the last gentlefolk moved out. Now, people of quality are strangers here. Most houses are flats, dirt-cheap; their stucco fronts a grimy ivory.  
  
I left only twenty-eight years ago, but it seems to me, trapped in my decaying body, more like a century.  
  
I recall, vividly, leaving. My mind plays tricks on me, and romanticises the scene – I remember it as being warm and dry, sunny - though I doubt it. I left by car, without a second glance backwards at the house – my future was everything, my future was here, my future was onboard the Titanic. 


	2. Southampton

The car waiting outside was not ours. Neither would the private railway compartment be.  
  
Both belonged to our neighbour. I sometimes wonder what happened to dear, fat Mrs. Rosenberg, shunned by all but us. Back home, perhaps, to Germany, and her wealthy husband's factories, when the war came? Perhaps. A German was never really welcome among the better people of Manchester Square. Though now, of course, a Jew, even a German one, is as unwelcome in Berlin as they would be in the Russia of fifty years ago.  
  
To go to America was, Aunt Edith had cried, as she came in for the pounce, a great opportunity. To go there as a guest, of one of New York's greatest bank managers (my great uncle, Frederick Gordon, manager of the Fifth Avenue branch of Barclay's Bank), would surely spell success.  
  
Success, of course, being marriage.  
  
So many novels nowadays, get it all wrong. Naturally, they have to do something to keep people's spirits up in time of war, but they seem to think that all women of my class and generation yearned escape from the confines of arranged and restrictive marriages – a frivolous fiction. Au contraire - we did not. Yearn for escape? We learned, instead, to embrace. To accept our fate, our lot, and be happy and thankful.  
  
I left Manchester Square with everything I had left in the world – a substantial amount - packed into a large black leather handbag from my school days, a pair of suitcases, and a sponge bag. Everything else, crushed into a hideous collection of mismatched and battered trunks, which has been sent ahead of me to Southampton by freight train the week before.  
  
Southampton was my choice. Aunt Edith, old dear, had been adamant I should travel with Cunard, but Cunard meant the best of British. British crew, British décor, British passengers – the inevitable bore with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the last half-century of Lords, his wife, the fleshy woman with such an eye.  
  
And perhaps more rationally (how we girls were encouraged to think rationally then!), Cunard also meant Liverpool, and Liverpool meant dirt and grime and hours on some grotty extra-urban slow train.  
  
So Southampton and, more joyously for me, the Titanic, it was. My choice, and my savings that procured me the hideously expensive stateroom.  
  
I do not recall whether it was sunny that day. The chauffeur placed a rug over my knee, and without a second glance, we set off for the station. I left Manchester Square, and London, for the last time, or so I thought, without a single look backwards at the settle, gentle life I was abandoning. Tea at the Savoy on my birthday, the patronage of poor neglected, socially inept old Mrs. Rosenberg (so different from clever English Aunt Edith, who knew all!), with her chauffeur and automobile, her pots of money and season ticket to the opera – all this, but her inability to procure an invitation to any halfway decent event in London.  
  
So very different from Aunt Edith, whose terraced house's upper bedrooms dated from the middle of the last century, whose old-fangled bath spouted erratic gushes of boiling water from a geyser, who was the last of the old school, the poor gentlewoman, whose financial situation dipped and rose yearly as her assets fell irrevocably, in whose secret shame her great niece, myself, was embroiled when she became her companion at the tender age of sixteen – too young for London. Could it have spoiled me?  
  
Aunt Edith was the last of a dying clan – those who had the breeding, but didn't have the wealth. In the aftermath of that industrialist society, money beat manners, hands down.  
  
I had only one regret. As we passed a station, I recalled Aunt Edith cautioning me against its associated moral filth, and I found myself very much wishing I'd ridden the tube.  
  
Aunt Edith was to accompany me to Queenstown. She had, she said, always wanted to see the Ireland of her youth, where her parents kept a country house, which they had shut up and sold when she was ten, and she had not yet returned. She would, she said, spend a pleasant night's stay in Queenstown, and buy all her lace to bring back to the dressmaker, and to make up into charity bazaar contributions, and presents for everyone for Christmas. And perhaps, she added tentatively as we boarded the train at Waterloo, enough to darn some nice new antimacassars for the drawing room.  
  
Southampton has never, to my knowledge, been a particularly inspiring place. But it was that day.  
  
Considering the ship was carrying nowhere near its full complement of passengers, an unusually vast crowd had turned up to see the ship off.  
  
"Workers' wives, I expect", sniffed Aunt Edith from her corner seat. "After all, this ship's keeping them in work, despite the miners."  
  
Aunt Edith, being elderly and somewhat prone to paranoia, was suspicious of the miner's strike which had, she breathed shakily, almost ruined her darling niece's plans. Though, naturally, had I travelled with Cunard...  
  
The ship was huge and lovely, and everything one expected. When I mull over it, it must have been sunny, for how else could the white paintwork of the upper decks gleam so terribly brightly?  
  
In these days of identity cards, it is pleasant to recall a time when one could, with a wave of a daintily gloved hand and a silently spoken assurance ("Yes, I am a person of quality. I am a lady, you may bow and scrape – please do".)  
  
Aunt Edith and I took to the gangplank, and boarded. 


	3. Cherbourg

Emotions are a universal matter, spanning all times and all places. Throughout the centuries, a million nieces have tasted the nagging pang of defeat.  
  
I was forced to admit that Aunt Edith, fanatically nationalistic as she was, had a point.  
  
"It's very small, dear – are you sure this is the right room? You could have had an even nicer one on a Cunarder for the same amount, and much closer to the deck. It's very dark, my love."  
  
I allowed her to discourse on the respective merits and failures of British and American shipping companies while I silently admitted that my cosmopolitan image of a ship filled with everything modern and American was not really materialising. On a maiden voyage, one expects to pay more, but even I, enthusiastic as I was, thought almost sixty pounds a little steep for this – an E-deck, first class stateroom, décor of the mass-produced style, utterly lacking the gilding and marble inherent in White Star's publicity. Small, with furnishings identical to a hundred cabins on this deck alone, a thousand others on a dozen White Star ships carrying pretentious girls like me across the ocean on the strength of their insubstantial bank balance – two beds, cot-type, sofa, wash basin (ceramic, not marble, brass taps, not gold, though I didn't really expect that), multi-purpose, suburban-style table (of the dressing, writing, and bedside order), and chair with somewhat alarming throwbacks to provincial working men's clubs across the north.  
  
I had come in search of a journey quite different from anything ever experienced by me before, and been granted an inside (but with narrow passage to horrid porthole, ergo, "outside") hole with carpet fabric that, I now began to realise, resembled greatly in its one dimensional floridity the strip of carpet that adorned the landing outside the sewing room back at Manchester Square, dating from some time around the death of Prince Albert.  
  
Positively, I forced myself to think, the ship is the largest in the world, on its maiden voyage, and taking you to America. Where you will have the best time ever, and marry an American, who will, obviously, be wealthy, influential, and liberal enough to let you saunter the world in the best staterooms of ships just like this one. Yes, I affirmed, vaguely aware, at the edges of my consciousness that Aunt Edith had mercifully ceased to talk – this voyage was merely a stepping-stone, to better things.  
  
I almost reversed my opinion at Cherbourg, where the ship docked that evening before dinner. Our midday departure went unwitnessed by my aunt and I in the midst of my unpacking on E-deck, in spite of what we later learned to be quite a lengthy delay that became the talk of those crashingly dull enough to have remained on deck to watch England slip blessedly into the distance. The Titanic's suction (a bizarre concept that I, at the time, could simply not comprehend – but how I understood later, and how I shook!) had caused another ship to break free of its moorings and swing dramatically into the path of the ship, causing an hour's action to occur, involving tugs, ropes, and all other whatnot.  
  
In any case, At Cherbourg, I became almost immediately converted to Aunt Edith's school of thinking, and berate myself for ever thinking of leaving England. All the detrimental discussions on Americans – they never give you time to breathe, they have no sense of order, they are by far to friendly with their betters – came flooding back as grotesque specimen after grotesque specimen clambered aboard at D-deck as we went into dinner. All seemed to be monstrously fat, with equally obese husbands in tow, swaddled in, respectively, layers of fur and frilliness, and layers of unnatural and synthetic fabric. Many had a dog, apparently to be spoken to as a child never should be, equally apparently incapable of walking, engulfed by fat hands with too many rings and destined to a life of pointless pampering. I was not best pleased.  
  
I very nearly abandoned my whole enterprise. Although the unwritten objective of my journey was to acquire me a husband (a seemingly easier task in a land of little sense of order), I seriously considered simply having a nice holiday as, Aunt Edith on arm, I processed into the dining saloon – depressingly Jacobean.  
  
Fortunately for me, that deity whose responsibility seating allocations are looked down favourably upon me. Just as I despaired of making an American marriage without ending up obese and positively canine, I sank down in my overstuffed chair, only to be greeted by Caroline. 


	4. Queenstown

Caroline was like no American I had ever met, before or since. She was travelling home to Philadelphia after a year in Paris with her brother, two years her senior, Robert. She was twenty-two years old, and the daughter of one of Pennsylvania's oldest and wealthiest families, originally from the depths of the "Old South", now the owners of a vast network of locomotive manufacturing factories.  
  
She was also marvellously depraved. To me, brought up in a world where the furthest into France I ever ventured was the Loire Valley, Caroline's cosmopolitan way of life seemed a million miles from my own. While I had toured dusty chateaux and resided in stuffy boarding houses, she had been doing her best to empty her father's bank accounts in the haute-couture fashion houses of the Champs Elysees while her brother indulged in all manner of debauchery under the pretence of obtaining some authentic Parisian artwork for his parents famous collection.  
  
If he was handsome, and he certainly was, she was beautiful. Aunt Edith and I were escorted to the squat, square, central table by a uniformed steward, who held out chairs for us as Robert and Caroline rose, and introductions were made. He wore a smart dinner suit, she an evening dress, in contravention to the usual rule aboard ship – that the first evening's dinner was never formal in dress code, as most passengers would not have found sufficient time to properly unpack and have pressed the clothes from their stateroom cases. As I later learned, Caroline took any excuse to dress well, and had her own maid to unpack for her.  
  
I do not recall precisely what was said at dinner that evening. The usual pleasantries were exchanged initially, of course. Our names, homelands, where we had been, where we were going. For a brief while we dipped into that most English of pursuits – the name game. One party would mention an acquaintance, in the hope of mutual familiarity, and, consequently, mutual social acceptance. As it transpired, the brother of the wife of my banker uncle was, along with his own wife and charming daughter, regular guests at the Philadelphian mansion at which the siblings habitually resided. Similarly, when in Berlin, Caroline had attended a most extravagant party hosted by the cousin of the husband of our dear Mrs. Rosenberg, at which the assistant to the American ambassador to London had also been present – the sister-in-law of that assistant being our neighbour across the square and next door but two, whose niece had been at the same regatta as me last summer. Et cetera, et cetera. And so the dinner passed, with the obligatory comments on the cuisine, the exoticism of French food, as compared to English and American, both now rather cosmopolitan nowadays. A shame, thought Aunt Edith. She for one recalled the hearty Irish food of her childhood, and thought it far superior. Irish stew was a great favourite for private meals at home in Philadelphia, confided Robert. Indeed, agreed Caroline. Perhaps it was something to do with the immigrant population. Her own family, their name of Garden now far removed from its original Irish foundation, was nonetheless connected, by however many years, to Ireland.  
  
Et cetera, et cetera.  
  
That evening, as we undressed to wash our faces, don our nightclothes and retire, my aunt reflected that the Gardens seemed very nice young people. A touch spoiled – did you see the lace on her gown? – but very nice, and such good companions for me for the duration of the voyage. Perhaps, if we really "hit it off", there would be an invitation to Philadelphia at the American end of the ocean, which would be such an opportunity for me . Complying, I turned off the lamp, and thanked heavens that this would be the only and last night I would be expected to share my "bijou" cabin with my relative of advanced years.  
  
The next morning, I did not see Robert or Caroline. I supposed they must breakfast in their staterooms – the children of such an influential industrialist must surely have a suite each, at the very least, or perhaps in one of the restaurants or cafes higher in the ship, where a supplement was charged for the privilege of eating there. You will see that even in first class, there were distinct social divisions.  
  
In any case, I breakfasted alone with my aunt, then helped her pack the single overnight case and toilette box she had brought with her, before checking that the suitcases and trunk that were to accompany her for the rest of her Irish sojourn were properly labelled and stowed safely in the baggage room to be loaded into the tender at Queenstown.  
  
We reached that port at late morning, and disembarked with those few among our class of passengers who were merely travelling cross channel. At the docks, we lunched on mussels, freshly caught, but remarkably pungent, and shopped for lace – much cheaper on land, I was assured, than onboard ship, where the hawkers whose special trading licences permitted them to board from their own boats sold low quality goods to gullible American tourists at extortionate rates. I escorted Aunt Edith to the hotel where she would spend the night, stayed only to see her settled in her room, and to enjoy a brief cup of tea, then left.  
  
I was seen off at the tender. Titanic was too large to dock at Queenstown's harbour, and relied on these small boats to ferry passengers, mail and cargo to and fro. I promised to telegram from New York directly I arrived, back to the post office in Dublin, to let Aunt Edith know I was safe. "But not from the ship, my dear. Companies always charge so very much for telegram messages to be sent. It's really quite shocking."  
  
And that was it. I reboarded the ship, for the very last time, and watched the receding Irish coastline from the deck, and vaguely wondered whether this would be the last time I would ever see British soil again. Then I went back to my cabin, noticed Aunt Edith's reading spectacles underneath the dresser, and dined. Caroline and Robert were there again, and it transpired to be a rather entertaining evening. 


	5. Manchester Square and Thursday

When I visited Manchester Square, I stopped to muse a while from a bench just in front of Aunt Edith's house. It was, I noticed, available to let, and I toyed momentarily with the idea of going to the travel agent that very minute and cancelling my clipper passage back to New York. People might think me mad, to abandon the life of a financier's widow for war-torn London. To choose the rationing, the utility clothing, the shortages of sugar, eggs, chocolate, coffee, tea, silk, tobacco, over the lands of plenty – my Long Island mansion, Park Avenue brownstone, Floridan villa.  
  
But it might be pleasant. I could so very easily remain here, in England, perhaps as a paying guest of some rural acquaintance. The war surely will not last for more than a further few years, and then I would be allowed to fade into obscurity, an elderly Englishwoman in an elderly English house, passing my days in austere respectability.  
  
But I will not. I will return home, to America, to my parties and cars and money, and watch my friends die around me, one by one, until there is nobody left who remembers the old days.  
  
From a radio, hidden on some windowsill high above the ruins of Manchester Square's garden, comes a song. It's that new one, played everywhere, like some queer disease, that infects everyone with its sad sorrow. I rise to leave, and the words drift down to me – "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."  
  
I stagger to my feet, haunted. The words are surely not applicable to me – they are too distant, too youthful – but they turn my heart to stone as I glance towards the pale grey skies and remember leaving Manchester Square, and the sun glinting off the ship. Mrs. Rosenberg, and Aunt Edith, and the servants, and Caroline and Robert, and Oxford Street, and Hyde Park. A world gone forever in a heartbeat flashes before my eyes as I return to my hotel, alone and chilled in the darkening twilight, a sorrowful, aging figure, self-pitying, far from home and yet so near.  
  
"Hope keeps smiling through, just like you always do", sang the radio. I remember my husband, and my wedding day, and crush those thought quickly as I seat myself at my window to watch the setting sun sink beneath the park's horizon.  
  
On Thursday evening, I watched the sunset alone from the boat deck before going down to dinner. The sky was clouded, the solar orb dimmed, and I abandoned the enterprise in search of sustenance. 


End file.
